Polar.sh
Polar.sh
Role
OSS-friendly checkout that sits between
Lemon Squeezy (international MoR) and the
donation grid on the family-wide /support page. Targets the
"sponsor an OSS maintainer" workflow that Lemon Squeezy doesn't
naturally cover — public sponsor tiers, GitHub repo integration,
direct issue funding. Polar is itself OSS (polarsource/polar,
Apache-2.0) and built specifically for the sponsor / maintainer
relationship.
Free tier
- No setup, no monthly platform fee
- Pay-per-transaction: 4% + 40¢ (lower than Lemon Squeezy's 5% + 50¢)
- Polar acts as merchant-of-record — VAT / GST / US sales-tax filing handled (same MoR posture as Lemon Squeezy)
- GitHub OAuth onboarding; bank/Wise/Payoneer for payouts; no payment method requested from us
- Public sponsor pages, tiers, one-off support, and digital-product checkout in one tool
Card / subscription required?
NO. Free-tier sign-up is GitHub OAuth + payout method. Their cut is withheld at settlement.
Methods exposed to the donor
Card (any major brand), Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link, ACH (US). Same breadth as Lemon Squeezy; lacks the PayPal / UPI rails (covered elsewhere in the donation grid).
Where it sits on /support
Slots between Lemon Squeezy (international checkout) and the donation rails — explicitly tagged "OSS-friendly checkout" so visitors looking to sponsor maintainership end up here, visitors looking to license a product end up at LS, and visitors looking to drop a tip end up at the Ko-fi / BMC / GitHub Sponsors row.
Alternatives
- Lemon Squeezy — broader product catalog, slightly higher fees
- GitHub Sponsors — adjacent role, GitHub-native, 0% platform but limited product surface (donations + tiers, no checkout for digital products)
- Stripe direct — no MoR (we'd owe VAT/GST/sales-tax filing ourselves)
- Liberapay — donation-only, recurring-only, 0% platform but no product checkout
- Open Collective — fiscal-host model, transparent fund accounting
Swap cost
Medium — webhook handler in the Hono Worker is wrapped behind a
@chirag127/billing-polar package (planned alongside the existing
billing-lemon-squeezy and billing-razorpay modules). Swap =
re-implement webhook verifier + checkout-link generator.
Why this is our pick
- Lower fees than Lemon Squeezy for the OSS sponsor / maintainer case (4% + 40¢ vs. 5% + 50¢)
- GitHub-native UX — repo integration shows sponsor tiers on the README badge alongside the existing GitHub Sponsors button
- MoR coverage matches LS — VAT / GST / US sales-tax handled
- OSS itself — escape hatch is real (Apache-2.0 codebase) so vendor-disappearance risk is bounded